A number of organizations such as credit card firms, automobile manufacturers, rental car companies, department stores, long distance telephone organizations, financial institutions and others have offered a number of different programs for promoting purchases of goods or services. These have included discount offers for certain catalog items, based on volume of activity in an account. Other promotional schemes have involved discounts on goods or services offered by others. For example, discount coupons have been offered for airline tickets based on a minimum level of investment at a bank or savings and loan. Similarly, holders of bank cards have been offered deeply discounted or free air travel based on a certain level of activity using a general purpose charge card or have been credited with frequent flyer miles based on activity in a charge card account.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,025,372, issued on Jun. 18, 1991 to Burton et al. discusses the problems associated with administering promotional or incentive marketing programs that utilize an award of merchandise. In one form of promotion, the incentive company has its own warehouse facilities to store the merchandise. There are a number of disadvantages of this approach. The incentive company has to prepare catalogs, stock and distribute them. An inventory of merchandise ties up the incentive company's money. If the incentive company underestimates or overestimates the demand for a particular item of merchandise, either excessive delay will create customer dissatisfaction or the incentive company must suffer the loss associated with merchandise which does not move. The approach proposed by Burton et al. to overcoming these problems is to implement an incentive award program using computer systems and to issue, instead of merchandise, credit instruments which enable the participant in the program to select a reward of their own choosing.
U.S. Pat. 5,297,026, issued Mar. 22, 1994 to Frank Kaufman discloses a computerized system which links a high rate of return on invested funds to levels of performance in the activity which the incentive awards program is designed to motivate.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,483,444, issued on Jan. 9, 1996 to Hindsman et al., discloses a computerized system for providing incentives for travel agents and awards cumulative credits to travel agents based on bookings of travel related reservations.
In addition to the problems noted above, merchants who sponsor an incentive awards program would like to be freed of the administration of the redemption or fulfillment processes. Some incentive award programs are subject to a type of fraud in which persons obtain coupons without being bonafide purchasers of the goods or services which are being motivated by the incentive awards program. Those coupons, if redeemed by parties who would otherwise not be entitled to do so frustrate the underlying motivation of running an incentive awards program.
Most of the incentive award programs do not permit a sponsor or an administrator of such a program to gather information about the customers. Further, it is difficult to provide instant gratification to a participant through an instant award. In addition, most incentive award programs do not adapt to the level of experience of the user, thus creating a monotonous presentation for the customer.